


Former hemophiliac, current autophobe

by Multifandom_damnation



Category: DC's Legends of Tomorrow (TV)
Genre: Developing Friendships, Emotional Baggage, Everyone Needs A Hug, Gen, Heart-to-Heart, Hemophilia, Homework, Loneliness, POV Lita | Mick Rory's Daughter, Unresolved Emotional Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-27
Updated: 2020-10-27
Packaged: 2021-03-08 22:15:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,739
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27224116
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Multifandom_damnation/pseuds/Multifandom_damnation
Summary: Lita has to do a case study on somebody with a medical condition, and instead of doing her fathers burns or Sara's many deaths or John's tango with the occult, Mick thinks that he has the perfect test-subject to document. If she leaves out the oddities, of course. And maybe Lita might discover some personal information as well.
Relationships: Lita | Mick Roy's Daughter & Nate Heywood
Kudos: 10





	Former hemophiliac, current autophobe

**Author's Note:**

> I honestly haven't watched Legend's since season one but I've been keeping up with the gossip on Tumblr and YouTube and stuff and I adore Nate and think that Lita is really cool, and wish we got to see/read more about their friendship, you know?? Anyway, this is just a silly fic I came up with when I should have been doing my own homework, so I hope you guys enjoy, and that it's not too hard to follow haha.

One late afternoon, Lita made her way through the many long hallways of the Waverider towards her father's room, her arms laden with textbooks and notebooks and a pencil case filled with stationary. She greeted Sara with a smile as she passed her in the hall, and when Behrad made a confused face at her stack of books, she merely shrugged her shoulders and he rolled his eyes, but neither of them spoke, and she sort of preferred it that way.

She knocked on her father's door, the metal cold and unyielding under her knuckles, and waited for a few seconds for her affirmative grunt before she pressed the button that unlocked the doors and they slid open with a satisfying hiss. 

Mick was sat at his desk, his glasses low on his nose as he slowly typed away at the old typewriter on his desk, the only light in the room the one pointed at the keys. Lita had to step around the amount of junk on the ground to get to him, careful not to touch any of the weapons or the prototypes on the other table cluttered with tools and machinery.

“What are you doing?” Lita inquired as she sat on the bed, putting her book aside and leaning forward with her elbows on her knees. 

“Plotting the next instalment of books for Rebecca Silver,” Mick grunted as he continued typing, slow and steady. “What do you want?”

Idly, Lita flicked through her textbooks and double-checked her homework. “I need help with my homework,” she said. “I’ve got a weird assignment that you might be able to help you with.”

“Me?” Mick frowned. “What makes you think that I can help you?”

“I don’t know. You’ve been around. You might now things,” Lita said.

Sighing, Mick removed his glasses and spun around in his chair to face Lita, leaning back and crossing his arms over his chest. “What’s the assignment?”

Grinning, Lita bounced up from the bed and brought her homework over to the illuminated desk, placing it down beside the typewriter. Mick swivelled in his chair to peer at it over his glasses. “I’ve got to write a report on a medical condition or surgeries or something. Like, heart conditions or neurological issues and stuff. I was thinking that I could write it about your burns.”

“That’s not a medical condition,” Mick grunted as he flicked through the pages. “That's stupidity. Have you got any other ideas?”

“Um,” Lita faltered. “I don’t know what else to do. That’s why I came to you. I kinda have to find someone who has the condition, so that’s why I thought your burns were a good idea.”

“Hm,” Mick frowned. “Sara’s died a couple of times, you could talk to her. Ava’s a clone. John died from lung cancer. Behrad has also died a couple of times, but not really. Mona is a wolf,” he snapped the book closed. “You should go and talk to Pretty.”

Reeling, Lita took the book when he offered it to her and clutched it to her chest. “Uh, right. Why should I talk to Nate, again? What has he got?”

Sniffing, Mick adjusted his glasses. “Not anymore. He had that… that blood thing. Hema… hemo… something.”

Lita frowned. “ Hemophilia?”

“That’s the one.”

“That’s a life-threatening condition,” Lita said. “Why isn’t he dead yet? I’ve seen what you guys get up to. By all accounts, he really should be dead.”

Mick shrugged as he pushed his glasses up and turned back to his typewriter. “No clue. The same thing that turns him into metal got rid of the blood thing. You should ask him about it. You’ve already said that he’s the best professor you’ve ever had. Now scram, and don’t come back anytime soon unless you’ve got burgers and beers.”

Smiling, Lita collected her things and left the dark, cluttered room, the doors sliding shut behind her. She paused a moment longer and could hear her dad muttering as he slowly typed out the words.

She was sure that Nate would either be found in the library or his bedroom and considering she didn’t know what part of the ship housed Nate’s room, she decided to visit the library first. There was also the chance that he might be hanging out in the engine room with Behrad, but she highly doubted it. Besides, if he wasn’t in the library, she could always ask Gideon for some information before she found him.

But, she was unsurprised to find him in the library, seated at the round table with his head in his hand, hunched over a book as he idly flipped the pages on the thick tome. He looked tired, and kind of sad, but Lita thought that was none of his business. “Hi,” she announced her presence and he looked up at her through his eyelashes. “What’re you reading?”

“Oh, just refreshing my memory of the Ottoman wars, nothing important,” Nate shut the book with a _ snap! _ and turned to her with a grin, reaching up to push his hair out of the way. “How can I help you, little Miss Lita?”

She struggled a little to force a displeased place at the nickname, but he was just too sweet, and she knew he didn’t mean any harm by it. “I’ve got a school assignment where I have to write a report on a medical condition or something, and they would prefer us to write it about a condition that somebody we know has, just so we have some evidence and first-person accounts to collaborate our findings, yadda yadda. Dad said that I should come find you and ask you about your hemophilia?”

“My hemophilia?” Nate frowned. “Why would you want to do a report about that?”

“Well, I was going to do it about the burns on dad’s arms, but he said that was boring,” Lita swung her body back and forth, holding her books in front of her. “He said that talking to you would be more interesting, and frankly, I have to agree. Besides, you’re the only person on this ship who has a medical condition that doesn’t involve you being dead at least once. And you’re…” she waved her hand at him. “... a normal person. Not a clone or an assassin or a pyromaniac or a guy with wind powers or a shape-shifter or a magician-”

“Practioner of the dark arts,” Nate interrupted kindly. “He gets cranky if you butcher his title, but yeah, I see your point. I’m not going to lie, it’s not the most interesting topic to talk about, but I’d be happy to help you out.”

Beaming, Lita placed her books down on the table before she flounced over to one of the empty chairs. “So,” she asked, resting her hands under her chin. “What was it like?”

“It sucked,” Nate laughed. “It totally sucked. My parents were always super protective. Like, it got so bad that I scraped my knee when I was five and went to the hospital, and then I didn’t leave the house again until I moved out and went to college at sixteen.”

Lita frowned. “Woah, really?”

“Oh yeah,” Nate leaned back in his chair, his arms crossed against his chest and swivelling back and forth in his chair. “ _Now_ , I suppose I understand why they did it, but I hated it. Hemophilia can be really dangerous, but I was never really an adventurous kid before I joined the Legends. I liked my books, not skateboarding down steep hills without a helmet.”

“What did you do for fun?” Lita asked. She couldn’t imagine being locked in her room, a prisoner in her own home. If her mum had done that, she never would have forgiven her. 

Nate shrugged. “Well, I read a lot. The one good thing about my childhood was that it was never an issue to get new books. My dad would bring some home every time he came back from work, and whenever I told my mum that I had finished my last batch, she would rush to the library to find me something else, but I couldn’t ever go with her and choose them myself. Uh, there was a lot of time spent eating, but we didn’t have any sharp cutlery, in case I cut myself. I slept a lot. Uh…”

He trailed off, unable to think of anything else. His brow furrowed as he struggled to come up without another hobby. Lita was starting to think that maybe coming to Nate for help wasn’t such a good idea. “Did you have any friends?” she asked.

Scoffing, Nate reached up and run another hand through his hair. “Of course,” he seemed nervous. “Hamilton. Earhart. Christie. Einstein. Frank. Poe. Franklin. Dickins. Darwin. You know, the greats.”

Lita forced a smile. This wasn’t how she had expected this conversation to go, but still, she was fascinated. It all just made so much sense now, why Nate was so friendly to everyone he met, why he was devastated whenever someone left, why he was sometimes reckless and ran into situations without thinking, why he was so brave and defensive of the rest of the team. Hearing this was just like connecting the final dots to her mind map or finding the last pieces of her puzzle. “You were kind of a lonely kid, huh?”

Shrugging, Nate spun his chair in circles. “I guess you could say that. But it wasn’t all bad, even though it sounds like torture. I liked my research and I loved reading about history, so while it did feel a little stifling being cooped up, I honestly did enjoy learning about historic events. That’s why I became a historian. I loved it. I grew up trying to find those missing pieces and the things not explicitly said.”

“What actually _is_ hemophilia?” Lita asked. “It’s a blood thing, right?”

“Right,” Nate replied. “It’s where your blood doesn’t clot the way it should, so when I bleed, I bleed a _lot_. I’ve been sent to the hospital a couple of times from papercuts and things. My body doesn’t have the right factors to clot the blood on its own, so I took medication and injections and things, so there were a few times where we had to stop the bleeding ourselves while we drove to the hospital.”

While he spoke, waving his arms about as he gestured vaguely, Lita took notes in her book, though she wasn’t quite sure what she was writing for. Her assignment was going to end up as more of a case study on Nate than it would a report on hemophilia. “It sounds like you had a pretty shitty childhood,”

“Eh, it is what it is,” Nate shrugged. “I nearly died the first time I became a Legend. Sara nearly kicked me off the team because of it,”

“Really?”

“Oh yeah. I got hurt once, and I tried to keep it a secret, because I never wanted anyone to know that I was a bit of a liability, right? And when she found out, she put me on ship arrest. Then I got hit by an explosion while trying to save my grandfather, and I almost died from that as well, but Ray injected me with a weird Nazi toxin and got rid of my hemophilia entirely,” Nate said it all with barely a breath like he was reciting her something from a magazine. His skin changed to that cool metal alloy she remembered seeing the day she met him, and he reached up and rapped his knuckles against his skull, just like he had so long ago. She couldn’t help but smile. Some things didn’t change. “It just had the unexpected side-effect of turning me into steel, but I think that’s a pretty fair trade.”

“I think that’s pretty cool,” Lita smiled. Nate gave her a goofy grin. “I’d like to turn into metal or something.”

“Well, when you die and need a life-saving but untested treatment, we’ll see what we can do,” Nate joked.

“I’m going to hold you to that. I’ve got a very good memory,” Lita warned, but there was no bite to her words. She went back to scribbling notes in her book, colour-coding them and adding her own flair, while Nate waited patiently for her to finish. A thought came to her then, and all of a sudden it made perfect sense. But just as sure as she was of the connection, she was also worried about Nate’s reaction if he hadn’t figured it out yet, but she couldn’t keep it to herself. “Do you think that’s why you’re always so afraid when people leave? Like Ray and Zari and Charlie? Because you’ve never had friends before?”

Nate frowned and stopped spinning in his chair to think before he looked at her with his thick eyebrows pulled together. “What do you mean? Anyone would be upset if their friends left them.”

Not really looking at him, Lita shrugged. She felt like she opened a can of worms that should have stayed closed. “I don’t know. If I grew up all alone and isolated and with only my books for company, I would probably grow up desperate for company and friendship and people to love me. It only makes sense, you know? Nobody wants to be alone, much less a kid. I get why you were so desperate to be a Legend.”

For a long moment, Nate didn’t say anything. Lita pretended to doodle in her notebook so she didn’t meet his eyes, but she could feel his gaze hot against her scalp. “I don’t think…” he started but trailed off with a deep frown.

“I get it, you know,” Lita continued, very worried that she had stuck her foot in it. “It sucks being alone. I’ve never really had many friends, so I know what it’s like to need people. We leant about stuff like that at school. Codependency and touch starved people and autophobia. I get it.”

Before Nate could reply, thankfully, he was interrupted by the door flying open and Behrad entering the room, clapping his hands and rubbing them together. “Yo, Nate, are you ready to go yet, man? I’ve been waiting for you to help me down in the engine room for twenty minutes now- oh. Hi Lita.”

“Hi Behrad,” Lita greeted, brushing her hair out of her face. “Sorry, I’ve kept him busy.”

“No worries,” Behrad looked nervously between a smiling Lita and a pensive Nate with his eyebrows low over his eyes. “Uh, I hope I’m not interrupting something? If I am, I can come back later…”

“No, no, it’s alright,” Lita shut her textbooks and stood, collecting them all up and bringing them to her chest. “I was just asking his help for an assignment, but he’s given me pretty much all the information I need. Thanks, Nate.”

Blinking, Nate slowly stood up and pushed his chair in. He looked like he was reeling. “It’s no hassle,” he said. “If you need any more help, you’re more than welcome to come and ask, alright? If you need me-”

“I know where to find you,” Lita finished. “I know. Thanks for your help. You two have fun with all your tools in the engine room and all.”

Lita left the room with her books clutched to her chest, and she was aware of Behrad asking Nate what was wrong moments before the doors had finally slid shut behind her. She walked down the hallway back towards her room, ignoring the sounds of Sara and Ava in one of the broom closets, pausing to watch John categorise his spell components with Gideon’s aid, and passed her dads room and listened to the familiar sound of slow typing and garbled muttering.

When she arrived at her room, she placed all her books down on the desk, pulled out a chair, and opened her laptop. She began a Word document with a quick flip of her wrist. 

_ Hemophilia is a condition where the blood doesn't clot the way it’s supposed to, often leading to excessive bleeding from small cuts or scrapes, and in extreme cases, could also lead to death,  _ she typed, _ but even more interesting than the disease is the people who have it. Here is one of their stories. His name is Professor Nate Haywood, and he is my friend.  _

**Author's Note:**

> Oh, and autophobia is the fear of being lonely!


End file.
